December 6, 2012 — In addition to this week's NewsBreak(s), the editors have compiled the Weekly News Digest, featuring stories from the week just past that you should know about. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.

Vital Source Technologies, Inc., Ingram Content Group’s etextbook solution for publishers, academic institutions, and students, announced that 60 new publishers have added more than 35,000 new digital textbooks and online course materials to its VitalSource Bookshelf platform.

The most recent publishers using the VitalSource platform to reach the education market include 14 of the most recognized university presses. In addition, publishers that specialize in medical, scientific, law, religion, general trade, and standards-based education content have committed titles to the platform. These newest publishers join Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Wiley, McGraw-Hill, and more than 200 other publishers that currently make content available through VitalSource Bookshelf.

VitalSource Bookshelf has 2.7 million registered users on 6,000 campuses worldwide. Delivering digital content to institutions for more than a decade, Bookshelf users can access content from more than 260 of the world’s top academic, trade, and specialty publishers whenever and wherever they choose. The Bookshelf platform can be accessed online or via download, on a variety of device types including Mac, Windows, iPad, and Android.

Ingram Content Group Inc. is a subsidiary of Nashville-based Ingram Industries, Inc. The company provides books, music, and media content to more than 39,000 retailers, libraries, schools, and distribution partners in 195 countries.

Source: Ingram Content Group

Publishers Partner With De Gruyter for PDA

The idea behind Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) is simple: to offer users access to all digital content but only charge for actual use. Beginning in 2013, two of De Gruyter’s publishing partners—Harvard University Press and Böhlau Publishers—will offer their content globally through De Gruyter Online as part of the PDA distribution model. By participating in PDA distribution, these publishing houses will be able to provide customers with access to a greatly expanded range of academic content. The partnerships will particularly enlarge the range of publications available in the field of history.

“As a cutting-edge method for providing content to libraries and research institutes, the PDA model is experiencing increasing demand internationally, and has been greeted positively by our customers,” says Katrin Siems, vice president of marketing and sales at De Gruyter. “Thanks to the excellent content provided by our partners, our publication portfolio will now appeal to even more users.”

Beginning in 2013, libraries and research institutes will be able to rent access to about 11,000 ebooks, 250 journals, and more than 15 million database entries. At the end of the rental period, paid fees can be applied to content purchase.

Most academic journals insist that papers submitted to them conform to the journals own, idiosyncratic citation style. This has led to a proliferation of thousands of different citation styles, often with only minuscule differences in the placement of commas, or the use of quotation marks and italics. To support their users in this arduous task, modern reference management tools like Mendeley ship with 2,789 different citation styles that can be used when formatting a bibliography in Word or Open Office.

It turns out that 2,789 was still not enough. Being able to edit and create new citation styles easily was the top-ranked feature request by a wide margin on Mendeley’s user feedback board. Users frequently lamented that the one particular style they needed was not covered, or that they were unable to switch from tools such as EndNote or RefWorks as long as a particular style was lacking. The citation styles in EndNote or RefWorks are built in a closed, proprietary format, which prevents their re-use in other referencing tools. In response, scholars have created the open source CSL (Citation Style Language) standard, which has since been implemented in tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, Docear, and Qiqqa.

The main drawback of CSL styles, however, was that editing them required a knowledge of XML code, making it impossible for most researchers to adapt citation styles to their needs. Mendeley’s new WYSIWYG citation style editor allows anyone to click on any element of a citation they would like to change and then format the output with a few simple clicks. The output is saved in CSL-standard compliant XML and can thus be used in any other reference management tool. If researchers do not know the name of the citation style they need, they can simply type in an example, and the Mendeley CSL Editor will suggest matching styles.

Mendeley’s global community of 2 million academics have collectively uploaded more than 300 million research documents to the platform, making it one of the world’s largest academic databases. Now, Mendeley will apply the same principle of crowdsourcing to citation styles.

Wolters Kluwer Health announced a partnership with FX Conferences to provide easy access to thousands of hours of FX Conferences expert audio recordings designed for the pharmaceutical, medical device, biotechnology, and other healthcare-related industries. Through the partnership, FX Conferences resources will be accessible from the OvidSP platform.

The recordings provide users with current information on federal requirements, approval processes, and legal developments, along with practical guidance specifically for professionals in a variety of corporate industries. Topics have a global appeal and are relevant for multiple departments—R&D, Market Research, Compliance, Product Development, and more.

Each of the recordings consists of a 45-minute, telephone-based presentation delivered by expert international speakers, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. Ten recordings are grouped into 10 topic- and industry-specific collections and are available to Ovid customers with and without transcripts. The following collections are now available via OvidSP:

Topics in Regulatory Affairs-Pharmaceuticals

Topics in Clinical Trials-Pharmaceuticals

Topics in Quality Assurance-Pharmaceuticals

Topics in Biotechnology

Topics in Regulatory Affairs-Medical Devices

Topics in Clinical Trials-Medical Devices

Topics in Quality Assurance-Medical Devices

Topics in Food & Beverage Industry

Topics in Legal Affairs

Topics in HR, Leadership, Training, and Development

Source: Wolters Kluwer Health

VOOK to Offer Interactive Ebook Publishing With WeJITs

Democrasoft, Inc. and VOOK announced that Democrasoft’s WeJIT technology is now available through VOOK’s VookMaker program. WeJITs allow an ebook reader to communicate, from within the ebook, directly with the author, with other existing readers, and with new individuals outside the book who are not yet readers, but who can start participating in book-based discussions. This expands a book’s new readership and reach.

VOOK’s ability to combine ebooks with the WeJIT cloud-based discussion platform enable the author and readers to interact with each other from inside the ebook. This nonexclusive new service for VOOK comes in the wake of the recent joint announcement by Democrasoft, VOOK, and Waterside Productions, of the world's first two-way interactive ebook, made possible by WeJIT technology. The top-selling book, 11 Days in May, by J.D. Messinger and published by Waterfront Digital Press, included 32 embedded WeJIT discussions. That announcement quickly led to requests from other authors around the country to have the same WeJIT capabilities in their own ebooks.

WeJITs are designed to allow VOOK authors to offer an interactive experience for their readers and to increase both new hardcover and ebook sales, due to the WeJIT's interactive nature and the readers’ ability to share individual book-based discussions outside of the current ebook community. Readers can forward the URL for any embedded WeJIT discussion to anyone, even those who don’t yet have the book and may have never heard of it. New WeJIT participants then have the opportunity to purchase the book and other offerings from the author or publisher.

Source: Democrasoft, Inc.

JSTOR Announces Alumni Access Program

JSTOR announced a new Alumni Access program, which enables participating higher education institutions to provide their alumni with access to their JSTOR archive collections. This is an important next step in its ongoing efforts to extend access to scholarship to individuals around the world.

The launch of the Alumni Access program follows a successful 3-year pilot that was undertaken with nearly 50 institutions, including public and private institutions, U.S. and overseas universities, and theological seminaries. This pilot helped JSTOR and its partner libraries understand the implementation issues and to develop an approach that it believes will be valuable and sustainable. The feedback from both pilot institutions and their alumni has been overwhelmingly positive.

While the Alumni Access Program will officially launch in January 2013, JSTOR will turn on access and waive the Annual Access Fee (AAF) for the remainder of 2012. The Alumni Access participation fee is 10% of the institution's total AAF. The program is open to eligible higher education institutions worldwide; please contact us for eligibility requirements. Participating schools must support the bifurcation of alumni usage from their main account.

JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.